Breadcrumbs lost when hiding or flattening deeper nav levels

[kendralockard]

Context

Hi! I'm working on migrating a MkDocs project from awesome-pages to awesome-nav, and I’m running into an issue with breadcrumbs (enabled by the navigation.path feature from MkDocs).

In our old setup with awesome-pages, we could use flattening, e.g. ... | flat | folder/*/README.md to show only top-level and first-level pages in the sidebar, while still preserving the full internal hierarchy so breadcrumbs would display correctly.

Example of what used to work:

nav:
  - Folder:
      - Folder/README.md
      - ... | flat | Folder/*/README.md

This gave us:

• A flat sidebar, only showing top level and one level deep READMEs
  • Each folder had many more deeply nested subfolders/pages, but they did not appear in the sidebar (as intended)
• Breadcrumb navigation that worked for deeply nested pages

Now with awesome-nav, I’m trying something like:

nav:
  - Folder:
      - Folder/README.md
      - glob: Folder/*/README.md
        flat: true

and also tried:

      - glob: Folder/**/README.md
        hidden: true

as well as a bunch of other things, but no matter what I try, breadcrumbs don’t show because it seems awesome-nav only includes what’s explicitly matched in the nav section and it doesn’t preserve the deeper hierarchy.

Question

Is there currently any way (or planned feature) to preserve the full directory hierarchy for breadcrumb generation, while only displaying top-level and 1-level-deep pages in the sidebar? This may already be possible with awesome-nav's support for glob and deep glob patterns and I just don't understand how to do it?

Or, if this is not currently possible, is there any possibility that awesome-nav could include an option to recursively scan the directory and then apply visibility/flattening rules without removing those items from the internal nav tree?

Thanks for the awesome plugin, it’s been very useful and enabled a lot of excellent features for our MkDocs project!

[lukasgeiter]

If I understand your use case correctly, this should indeed be possible using a glob pattern:

nav:
  - Folder:
      - Folder/README.md
      - Folder/*/README.md

Note that glob: should only be used with additional options and flat and hidden are not supported options.

[kendralockard]

Thanks for the quick response! When I try setting up my nav section with that structure, it does achieve the layout that I want in the navigation sidebar, but the breadcrumbs still don't work. I may be missing something, though. I've attached a minimal reproduction here if you'd like to see what I'm trying:

breadcrumbs-bug-repro.zip

Steps to reproduce

1. Open zip file, navigate to root dir of project and install Insiders
2. Run mkdocs serve and go to local instance
3. Use the search bar to navigate to the page called "Nested"
4. Observe that breadcrumbs are not visible

I have the navigation.path feature in my mkdocs.yml, so I would expect this to work, but I am wondering if the internal hierarchy of the docs/ dir is lost because my .nav.yml does not explicitly call out any of the directories/files that are nested deeper than one level.

[lukasgeiter]

Unfortunately I don't have access to the insiders build, so I can't reproduce this.

Can you try to recreate the same structure without awesome-nav and see if that works? To do that you would make two changes in mkdocs.yml.

1. Remove awesome-nav from the list of plugins
2. Add a nav section with something along these lines:

nav:
  - Folder1:
    - Folder1/README.md
    - Folder1/Subfolder1/README.md
    - Folder1/Subfolder2/README.md